Tag: Review

Sometimes, you want to sit down to a game that will tax your creative and/or logical centres of the brain. Sometimes, you just want to turn your brain off and have fun. What about a game that basically lets you do both? Let me show you Tags.

Way back in 2008 (yes, 10 years ago!) Matt Leacock released Pandemic on the world. In a good way – I promise. Anyway, 2 years later, he took the cooperative gaming standard he had created and introduced players to a new game experience – Forbidden Island.

Games like Connect 4 and Tetris have always appealed to gamers of all ages. The simple efficient symmetry of making items form patterns is a quietly zen experience. Drop It decides to take that quietly organised experience, and make it simultaneously more fun and frustrating at the same time.

Every gamer knows the feeling – the ever-growing backlog and wishlist of games to be played. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was one game that particularly teased me for many years. My first case was in the mid-80’s, and it took me until 2014 before I could play the second case. And it continued to tease and frustrate me! But yet, I keep coming back for more…

Some great feedback I have received with the reviews coming so quickly now is while people enjoy learning how to play and teach the games, why they should be playing them in the first place hasn’t always come across. So to help me practice and get back into the why, what better choice than a game I cannot teach you how to play at all?

A game that is only just coming out to the west is Hanamikoji, bought across to Europe and many English speaking countries by EmperorS4. It is a game that is beautiful to look at but not immediately obvious what the game is, which doesn’t help get across how fun a game it truly is.

A quirk of fate has put my first ever video review back into my hands. Android: Mainframe, the first spin-off game from the Fantasy Flight Android: Netrunner universe. So what better way to celebrate than by showing it off AND re-reviewing the game two years later!